six burners

This is how the Six Burners blog opened:

Juggling life, love, and what to make for dinner.

I used to be a bread-swilling vegetarian. Now i’m a carnivore-celiac. I can cook just about anything – the trick is to make it tasty and repeatable (and now, gluten-free). After years of promising to write a cookbook, testing recipes on unsuspecting friends, and writing essays about food/life, now i blog.

Readers take heart: the meals do not require six burners to create. Many are pretty simple – they result from my look-and-cook approach to many dinners: look in the fridge, cook what’s there.

Except I didn’t blog very much.

We would be several bites into a meal before I would realise, “hey, this is blog-worthy.” By then, I might have forgotten to note what the ingredients actually were, and figuring out measurements was truly hopeless: it’s hard enough to figure out how much a blop or a splash, a shake, or a pinch is when I’m actually doing the blopping or splashing or shaking. Because of this, it’s hard for me to repeat meals that are especially tasty. Darn.

Then there was the whole challenge of taking photos of the food/process. It takes longer to cook when you are taking pictures along the way, and by the time the food is hot, plated, and ready to eat, you want to EAT IT, not wait for someone to adjust lighting, styling, etc. and take pictures of it.

So, the Six Burners blog is on hiatus. Scatterbeams will include food writing from time-to-time in the Six Burners category, with a gluten-free filter. I might write about a new restaurant or cookbook I’ve found, a recipe that I made up or adapted from someone else. While I rarely cook from a recipe, I always bake with one. And then the next time I usually change it.